With his eyes, Hide saw the core of the Calamity beast.

It was perfectly transparent, completely camouflaged within the golden liquid, about the size of a human heart. It was rolling smoothly around inside her liquid body, retreating up toward her shoulder to avoid the space Hide’s arm was currently occupying.

Time seemed to slow to an absolute crawl as Hide’s mind raced, piecing the puzzle together with razor-sharp clarity.

’She’s a Calamity Lord, but she’s still a beast,’ Hide thought rapidly. ’Every beast has a core. Every awakened human has a core. The core is the engine. It’s the source of the mana, the source of the abilities we use and the transformation. Her body is just a liquid vessel projected by that core.’

He had been approaching this all wrong. They had been trying to kill a liquid body, swinging swords and throwing rocks at water. But a liquid body doesn’t have a heart to pierce or a brain to crush.

If they couldn’t destroy the body, they had to destroy the engine.

’The core is completely detached,’ Hide realized, watching the transparent sphere roll through her liquid shoulder. ’It moves freely inside her to avoid taking damage. That’s why Claire’s sword never hits it. The liquid shifts, and the core just floats out of the way.’

If the core could move freely, it was impossible to hit with a blind strike.

Unless it couldn’t move.

"I see how it is now," Hide grated, his voice cold.

He didn’t pull his arm out of her stomach. Instead, he forced his left hand forward, plunging it directly into the golden liquid of her chest, violently grabbing blindly toward where the transparent sphere was floating.

"Get out of me!" Vora shrieked, sudden panic flashing in her mismatched eyes. She immediately tried to manipulate the gravity around Hide to throw him away.

But Hide acted first.

"Abyssal Frost!"

The dark, absolute-zero energy erupted directly from both of his hands, point-blank, entirely inside her liquid body.

A massive, apocalyptic wave of pitch-black ice violently expanded outward from Hide’s arms. The golden liquid didn’t stand a chance. The freezing temperature was so profound that the fluid making up Vora’s torso instantly crystallized, locking into jagged, solid black ice.

Vora screamed and made a horrifying, gurgling sound which didn’t match her human appearance at all, as the ice spread rapidly up her neck and down her thighs.

No matter what shape a beast takes, its still a beast that needs to be eliminated.

Hide was violently expelled as the liquid hardened, falling backward toward the earth. But he had accomplished his goal.

Vora hung in the air, her entire torso frozen solid into a massive block of black and gold ice. And trapped perfectly in the dead center of her frozen chest, entirely unable to move, was the transparent core.

But this was not something that could make Vora entirely useless, it just provided them a chance, as there was no knowing when would the calamity lord snap back to her senses and use gravity on herself to destroy the ice.

"Claire! The center of her chest!" Hide roared as he hit the ground. "Break the core!"

Claire stood at the edge of a small hill behind Vora’s body. She was panting, blood streaming down her face, her body screaming in exhaustion.

But when she heard Hide’s voice, her red eyes locked onto the frozen Calamity Lord.

She saw the faint refraction of the transparent sphere trapped in the ice.

"Ahhhhhhh!"

Claire screamed, pouring the absolute last drop of her mana into her telekinesis. pieces of metals rose from the destroyed buildings around her and converged to increase the length of her great sword by ten times.

Her red aura condensed entirely around the newly formed blade, wrapping it in a terrifying, superheated crimson glow.

Vora’s head, the only part of her still unfrozen, looked at Claire in absolute, raw terror.

"Wait!" Vora screamed, her voice cracking. "I am a Ruler of—!"

With a boom that shattered the sound barrier, Claire swung the greatsword in a devastating, horizontal arc.

The superheated, aura-infused blade sheared entirely through the black ice. It sliced cleanly through Vora’s frozen, golden chest, meeting the transparent sphere in the center.

For a fraction of a millisecond, the incredibly dense Calamity core resisted the steel.

And then, with a sound like a cathedral window shattering that echoed across the entire valley, the greatsword cleaved the core perfectly in two.

The two halves of the transparent core hung suspended inside the shattered ice.

Vora’s mismatched eyes widened in silent shock. The brilliant light in her pupils rapidly flickered, and then completely died out.

The oppressive, heavy atmosphere of surroundings vanished, replaced by a sudden, hollow silence.

And then, the horrific reality of the Calamity Lord’s existence caught up to her.

With the core destroyed, the magic sustaining her liquid form completely evaporated. The frozen golden liquid violently lost its luster, rapidly changing color and texture. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

In the blink of an eye, the magical fluid reverted entirely back into pale, fragile human flesh, blood, and bone.

Vora wasn’t a liquid god anymore. She was just a girl.

And she had a massive, gaping hole punched through her stomach, and her chest had just been cleaved entirely in half.

Normal, black blood erupted from the massive wounds. Vora’s human body dropped from the sky, hitting the cracked earth with a sickening, heavy thud. She gasped once, a wet, rattling sound, as a pool of blood rapidly expanded beneath her. She twitched, and then lay entirely still.

Dead from catastrophic blood loss.

Hide collapsed onto his back, his chest heaving, his muscles burning with sheer exhaustion. The dread that had been sitting on his chest for the last hour slowly began to lift.

He didn’t get any notification, that meant he didn’t get the kill.

But the phenomenon wasn’t over.

A few feet away, the corpse of the Calamity Lord began to violently disintegrate into ash. And from those ashes, a massive, roaring column of pure, gold life mana erupted into the dark sky.

It surged directly toward Claire.

The telekinetic warrior had landed heavily on her knees, leaning entirely on her greatsword. The vortex of gold energy spiraled around her, completely engulfing her in a blinding storm of pure life force.

It was the accumulated life mana of a B-Rank Calamity Lord, forcefully injecting itself into the victor’s core.

Claire threw her head back, a silent gasp escaping her lips as the immense energy flooded her veins. The red aura surrounding her violently shifted.

It expanded outward, shattering the loose debris around her, before violently condensing back into her skin. The crimson light deepened, the sheer pressure radiating from her body skyrocketing until it was almost suffocating to stand near.

The evolution of an A-Rank Exterminator to the peak of humanity. To S-Rank.

The golden storm finally faded, the last wisps of life mana absorbing into her chest.

Claire knelt there in the silence, the deep crimson aura slowly retracting into her skin. Her breathing slowed. The gash on her forehead had stopped bleeding, the residual life mana having partially healed her minor wounds.

Hide propped himself up on his elbows, wincing at the ache in his back.

"Claire?" he called out softly.

Claire turned her head, looking at him. Her red eyes burned with a new, profound, bottomless depth that hadn’t been there before. The sheer weight of her presence was staggering.

A faint, exhausted smile touched her lips.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Her eyes fluttered shut. Her grip on the greatsword released, and Claire collapsed face-first into the dirt, completely unconscious.